As everyone should notice rather quickly, I upgraded the forums. I'm struggling mightily in the first few minutes just sorting out icons and such, but I'm gonna give it a few days and see what happens.

Probably not. I got my first spambot account literally two minutes after upgrading the forums, and I've gotten two more in the last hour. Spambots know how to beat this stuff. I think we're still going to get ~50 junk accounts a day, unfortunately.

On the bright side I've done a much better job of modifying the confirmation page on the forums and the activation email to make it clearer for people what they need to do, and I've got a pretty good system for activations. I only get a couple per week, so I can handle it easily. For now.

Edited to add: I'll keep testing for a day with the captcha, but at this rate I'm inclined to just turn it off, since it's not helping much.

Are there any more successful alternatives out there we should look into? I've seen signups that have a text box and some extremely easy question which I imagine changes for every signup. I imagine that would be extremely effective...

For some reason, it looks like you have a different captcha running than both I and Soul Raver have (the only phpbb3's I knew off the top of my head). After checking, under "Visual confirmation settings", there's "GD CAPTCHA", which is supposedly better. Or, if you want to be fancy, there's Asirra, though I've still yet to find an easy way to stick it in phpbb.

I don't mind having a zillion styles added, as long as the defaults are always available. Many style creators seem to try and make things as busy as possible (just like FF skin makers), and 99% of them give me a searing headache after about 10 seconds because they have no concept of color matching or understanding that "cool" and "easy on the eyes" frequently don't play well together. I may not like the defaults, but they're bearable.

Personally, the more minimalist the better as far as I'm concerned.

_________________The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone--October Project: "Dark Time"

Really, Bamse? My SR forums, which have little activity at all, just started getting tons of spam accounts about a week ago as well, where before there were none. Maybe it does have something to do with the hacking.